NOTES for Joh 16:28
At last the moment has come when Jesus speaks to the disciples almost directly, in plain words, about the path that lies before Him. He says: I came from the Father and am going back to the Father. What did the disciples think at that moment? We can only wonder. But Jesus Himself tells them plainly that very soon they will all scatter, leaving Him alone. And then only His Father will remain with Him.
From these words it is clear that the disciples never truly understood the meaning of their Teacher's words, and the events soon to come will confirm this. The same thing happened as with the Savior's words about His messiahship and about the messianic Kingdom: the apostles understood them in their own way, according to the ideas about the Messiah and the Kingdom that belonged to the popular religiosity of the Gospel age. In Jesus' words they evidently saw a hint of some glorification of their Teacher, but more likely an earthly and purely human one. They understood the words "I am going to the Father" not in the sense of His death and resurrection, but in the sense of the outward triumph they expected. After all, the apostles were not so naive that they failed to understand the imagery and symbolism Jesus used. It is just that this symbolism had several layers of meaning. Both glorification and return to the Father could be understood in different ways.
One could see in all this something corresponding to traditional popular ideas about the Kingdom, or one could see what Jesus meant. In the first case everything was simple and clear: Jesus is speaking of Himself as the Messiah, speaking directly and without allegories. God sent Him, His heavenly Father, from whom He comes as a messenger from Heaven, exactly the kind of messenger that popular religious consciousness pictured the Messiah to be. And now He is returning again to the Father, from whom He will at last receive the fullness of authority to establish the messianic Kingdom. An earthly kingdom, of course, since most believing Jews at that time did not imagine any other kind.
Most likely, the disciples of Jesus understood their Teacher's words in just this way. And Jesus, of course, knows this. That is why He says that very soon they will all scatter: He foresees their reaction to His arrest, which will come to them as a complete and absolute shock. Still, He tried to tell them about His path as clearly as it was possible to do, given their expectations and their spiritual condition. Nothing more could be said. From that point on, everything depended on them themselves and on their choice.